Welcome to Our Hillbrow

"Hillbrow is a notorious suburb of Johannesburg. Johannesburg, as far as I can tell, is the most notorious city in the world. Hillbrow is Johannesburg’s Johannesburg. People in Johannesburg are scared to go to Hillbrow, even those that live there. This book was one of the first looks at what it meant to be young and black and relatively hip in the post-apartheid period. It’s a great book but I also chose it, in part, to indicate how many African writers we’ve lost. They just died – as Phaswane did, too young – of some unknown illness. I feel abandoned because I don’t have my tribe of black writers next to me. There are several wonderful black writers. One is my friend Zuki Wanner. She’s been writing novels with incredibly funny premises, like one about an upper-class black woman who gets a white woman as a maid, which in South Africa is an absurd idea. There are some others. But South Africa is not a country conducive to serious writing. I don’t mean serious in the sense of solemn, but serious in the sense of someone taking two to five years out of life to write. The economics aren’t there, the readership isn’t there and the career structure isn’t there. It’s immense and hidden. About 20% of our adults are infected. It’s slowing down now and the government is taking it seriously. But in the late 1980s and all the way through the 90s people were dying at a rate of something like 1,000 a day. We have so many people and such high unemployment and such little care for each life that we lost this huge number of people, about 2.5 million, almost without noticing. Now we have a vast orphan problem. But the key thing about South Africa is, if you are a member of the middle class, you can live here and have almost no contact with its problems."